The season moves forward the way seasons do one match at a time, one week at a time, the table shifting and settling and shifting again while the world outside the club continues to ask the same question in different ways.
The question is always the same: when does Marco Santos play?
The answer, for ten matchdays, is the same: not yet.
Matchday 1 Graystone 1-1 Northend Athletic Marco: not in squad
Matchday 2 Castleford Rovers 2-0 Graystone Marco: not in squad
Matchday 3 Graystone 3-1 Millhaven City Marco: not in squad
Matchday 4 Brackfield Town 1-1 Graystone Marco: not in squad
Matchday 5 Graystone 0-2 Fenwick Athletic Marco: not in squad
Matchday 6 Redmoor Town 1-0 Graystone Marco: not in squad
Matchday 7 Graystone 2-2 Vale United Marco: not in squad
Matchday 8 Croft FC 1-3 Graystone Marco: not in squad
Matchday 9 Graystone 1-1 Halton Town Marco: not in squad
Matchday 10 Borough FC 0-1 Graystone Marco: named as substitute — unused
Ten matches. No minutes. One spot on the bench at the end of it, and even that came and went without his boots touching the pitch.
He trains every morning. He is first in and last out. Briggs watches him and says nothing encouraging and nothing discouraging. Joel works with him three times a week on the defensive specifics. The gap, as Briggs described it, is closing.
But the gap is still there.
Lucas has a free week. Queensgate have an international break and Lucas finds himself with seven days and nowhere he has to be. He calls Rico on Sunday evening. By Tuesday morning he is in the kitchen with Sofia, a bag on the hallway floor, the particular relaxed energy of someone who has stepped out of their schedule and is remembering what it feels like to just exist somewhere.
Sofia has already found the teabags and is reading something on her phone at the far end of the table.
Marco is in the kitchen too. He has been there since before Lucas arrived. He is sitting across from Rico with his hands around a mug, looking at the table in the way he has been looking at things recently present but elsewhere. Rico is watching him with the careful attention of a man who has raised children and knows the difference between tired and something heavier than tired.
MARCO: "Ten matches."
He says it to the table rather than to Rico.
MARCO: "Ten matches and I haven't played a single minute. Not one. They put me on the bench last week and didn't use me and everyone acted like that was progress."
RICO: "It is progress."
MARCO: "I'm not a progress story. I'm a player. I came here to play."
Lucas pours himself a coffee and sits down. He looks at Marco. Then at Rico. Then back at Marco.
LUCAS: "Look at the bright side. You were on the bench last week. That counts for something."
Marco looks at him.
MARCO: "Does it?"
LUCAS: "Yes. It means they considered using you. They looked at the match and said if we need him, we'll call him. That is different from not being in the picture at all."
Marco is quiet.
RICO: "Your time will come."
MARCO: "You keep saying that."
RICO: "Because it's true."
MARCO: "But when?"
Rico looks at him. The look of a man who has given the same answer many times and knows that the answer is not what is being asked.
RICO: "When you're ready."
MARCO: "I'm ready now."
RICO: "Briggs doesn't think so."
MARCO: "Briggs hasn't given me the chance to show him."
An alarm goes off on Marco's phone. He looks at it. Training time.
He does not move.
RICO: "Let's go."
MARCO: "What's the point."
The kitchen goes quiet.
Lucas sets his coffee down.
Rico looks at Marco for a long moment. Not with frustration. With the steady patience of someone who has been here before not in this kitchen, not with this person, but in this exact place where the doubt arrives and tries to make itself at home.
RICO: "The point is that you came from Milan. You worked in warehouses and garages for a long time so you could save enough to buy a plane ticket to find a man you had never met, you climbed over a gate, you sat in this kitchen and told us you wanted one chance."
He leans forward slightly.
RICO: "This is the chance. This the training, the waiting, the bench last week. This is what the chance looks like from the inside. It doesn't look like you imagined it never does but it is still the chance."
Marco looks at the table.
RICO: "The passion is still there. I can see it. Don't let the doubt sit next to it and pretend it belongs there."
LUCAS: "I'll come. For the session. If that helps."
Marco looks at him.
LUCAS: "I have a free week. Might as well be useful."
Marco looks at Rico. Rico gives him nothing just waits.
Marco picks up his phone, turns off the alarm and pushes back his chair.
MARCO: "Fine. Let's go."
Lucas disappears upstairs to find something to train in.
He has not packed for training. He packed for a week of doing very little and there are no shorts in his bag, no boots, nothing that resembles training gear.
He checks the bag twice. Confirms the absence of anything useful.
He goes to Rico's room and knocks.
LUCAS: "Do you have anything I can borrow?"
RICO: (from downstairs) "Bottom of the wardrobe. There are some old things in there."
Lucas opens the wardrobe.
At the bottom, folded with the careful inattention of things that have been put away without being thrown away, are several old training jerseys, faded and worn at the collar. The kind of thing that accumulates over a career and never quite gets cleared out.
He pulls one out.
Holds it up.
It is green and gold.
Brazil.
Not a replica. Not a souvenir. A match jersey, worn, with a small badge on the chest and the slight roughness of fabric that has been washed many times. The name santos on the back.
Lucas stands in his father's room holding his father's old Brazil jersey.
He is not sure how long he stands there.
He thinks about the drawer in his apartment in Manchester. The Brazil U-21 shirt folded inside it. The one he has never thrown away and has never taken out again.
He puts the jersey on.
He comes downstairs.
Rico is already at the back door. Marco beside him, lacing his boots on the step. They both look up when Lucas appears.
Rico looks at the jersey.
Something crosses his face that he does not name.
RICO: "Hmm. It's fits."
LUCAS: "It's gotten smaller than I can remeber."
Marco looks up from his boots.
MARCO: "Or you've gotten bigger."
Lucas points at him.
LUCAS: "I'm going to work you very hard today."
Rico pushes off from the doorframe. He is already smiling as he walks out toward the pitch.
The garden pitch is small not a proper pitch, never was, just the stretch of grass behind the house that Rico cleared and levelled years ago when three children needed somewhere to run. It is enough for what they need today.
Rico works with Marco on the defensive positioning that Briggs has been drilling at Graystone. The aerial work, the distribution. Marco is focused in the way he is always focused completely, without remainder.
After forty minutes Rico steps back.
RICO: "Lucas. One versus one. You attack Marco defends."
Lucas rolls his neck. Marco squares up.
Lucas takes the ball.
He moves toward Marco at about sixty percent pace testing, reading, the way he approaches everything on a pitch. Marco holds his position well. Weight on his toes. Watching the hips, the way Rico taught him.
Lucas shifts left. Marco goes with him.
Lucas shifts right. Marco tracks it.
Then Lucas stops.
He looks at Marco.
Marco looks back at him.
Then Lucas does something that should not work at any level of football and absolutely should not work in a garden in England on a Tuesday morning against a twenty-eight year old who has been training seriously for three months.
He does an elastico.
Not a half-hearted one. A full, committed, ridiculous elastico the ball rolling to the outside of his foot and then flicked back inside in a single movement so fast that Marco's weight goes entirely the wrong way and he takes two steps in the direction the ball is no longer going.
Lucas is past him.
He does not score. He just keeps running, the ball at his feet, and then turns around with an expression of complete innocence.
LUCAS: "Sorry. Force of habit."
Marco stands with his hands on his knees.
MARCO: "That's — you can't do that in a real match."
LUCAS: "I do it in real matches."
MARCO: "Against defenders who have been playing for fifteen years."
LUCAS: "Yes."
Marco straightens up.
MARCO: "Again."
Rico, watching from the side, says nothing.
But he is smiling.
They go again and again. Lucas wins most of them he is a Ballon d'Or winner in his prime going against a man who has been training seriously for three months and it would be strange if the result were anything else but Marco improves with each repetition. The second elastico does not work as cleanly as the first. The third time Lucas tries something different. Marco reads it.
He wins the ball.
He does not celebrate. He just turns and plays it out to Rico and resets.
LUCAS: (quietly, to Rico) "He's getting better."
RICO: (equally quietly) "I know."
Inside the house Sofia is making dinner.
She has found her way around Rico's kitchen with the comfortable efficiency of someone who does not need to be shown twice. Something is in the oven. The table is already set for four.
At one point she comes to the kitchen window and looks out at the pitch.
Three figures in the fading afternoon light. The oldest one standing to the side watching. The other two going at each other again she can see from the body language that Lucas has done something that made Marco stumble and is now acting as though he has no idea what Marco is so annoyed about.
She watches for a moment.
Then she goes back to check on oven.
They come in as the light goes.
Boots off at the door. The smell of dinner reaching them before they are fully inside. Lucas immediately identifies what is cooking and makes a sound of approval. Marco is quieter still in his head, still working through the session, the way he always is after he trains.
Rico washes his hands at the sink.
He looks at Marco in the reflection of the window above the sink.
The doubt that was in Marco's eyes this morning is not gone but something has shifted next to it. Something that was not there before.
Purpose, maybe. Returned to its proper place.
SOFIA: "Fifteen minutes."
LUCAS: "Thank you. You are a better person than I deserve."
SOFIA: "I know."
Marco sits down at the kitchen table.
He looks at the table. Then out the window at the pitch, which is dark now.
Then he looks up at Rico.
MARCO: "Tomorrow. Six o'clock."
Rico dries his hands.
RICO: "I'll be there."
Lucas, pulling off Rico's old Brazil jersey to change before dinner, pauses for a second.
He folds it.
Sets it on the counter.
Leaves it there.
END OF CHAPTER 28